Sri Lanka experienced a nationwide electricity blackout on Saturday after its national power grid shut down. Officials suspected that excessive solar power generation may have triggered the failure. The outage disrupted electricity supplies across the country, while engineers worked to restore the system.
State-run Electricity Distribution Lanka said engineers were addressing a fault affecting the entire grid. The blackout continued for more than two hours, with authorities unable to provide a clear restoration timeline. Energy Minister Anura Karunathilaka said officials planned to restore electricity in stages.
Read more: Electricity losses continue in the country caught in electricity crisis
The minister also urged rooftop solar system owners to disconnect their systems temporarily. He said the request would support efforts to bring electricity supplies back online. Authorities asked users to wait for further instructions before reconnecting their equipment.
Sri Lanka experienced a similar nationwide grid failure in February 2025. On that occasion, solar generation exceeded electricity consumption during a sunny Sunday. Power restoration took more than six hours. The latest incident has renewed attention on the challenges of managing growing solar electricity production.
Sri Lanka has installed solar power capacity exceeding 3,000 megawatts. Meanwhile, daytime electricity demand typically ranges between 2,000 and 2,500 megawatts. This difference can create challenges when solar production rises sharply while overall consumption remains lower. However, officials had only identified excess solar generation as a suspected cause of Saturday’s breakdown.
Government tax concessions have encouraged households and businesses to adopt solar energy systems. Many consumers also sell surplus electricity back to the national grid. These arrangements have expanded solar use but created balancing challenges for the country’s electricity provider. Grid operators must manage changing production and demand to maintain stable supplies.
Sri Lanka plans to increase its solar generation capacity to nearly 4,400 megawatts within three years. The target represents a 388 percent increase compared with 2024 levels. Meanwhile, engineers continued working to repair the grid and restore electricity. Authorities had not announced a complete restoration timeline in the reported update.